Authorship & Theory in Paul Auster

In a previous article I argued that Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy is an exploration into The difficulties and desire to know another and that the first two of these texts read as a postmodern take on the detective novel, a genre that typically revolves around one human being following another and interpreting the movements and actions of this person in an attempt to understand the followed Other. In this article I will argue for a completely different reading of the text. Instead of focusing on the consequences of a prolonged absence of the Other I will instead argue that Auster’s The New York Trilogy is in fact an exploration into modern concepts of authorship and approaches to literary theory.

In recent decades authorship has undergone several important changes and a divide has become apparent between the approaches of academics and that of critics towards authorship and text. Starting with T. S. Eliot’s “The Intentional Fallacy” in which the text was seen as an autonomous entity that needs to be situated in the traditions of those texts that preceded it rather than to be tried to situated in the situation in which it was produced by the author. According to Elliot a text should be read in isolation for its own merits in relation to the traditions of the genre. Elliot further argued that for a correct reading of a text a critic should be aware of all of these traditions in order to fully appreciate it. He further argues that the author of a text should also be aware of these traditions.

This first separation of author from text was continually increased until Barthes finally created an unbridgeable gap between, theoretical canyons in which he threw the author to his death in his article “The Death of the Author.” In this article Roland Barthes argues that the author has no place within the text. He claims that the author is only a creating vessel who gives birth to a text but after this giving of life is killed off and the text lives on autonomously and without the author’s influence. Foucault, writing around the same time, clarifies some of the ambiguities of this statement by arguing in “What is an Author?”;

‘it is a very familiar thesis that the task of criticism is not to bring out the work’s relationship with the author, nor to construct through the text a thought or experience, but rather to analyze the work through its structure, its architecture, its intrinsic form, and the play of its internal relationships.’
As Foucault however highlights in this article, killing off the author does come with some inherent problems, questions and difficulties. Indeed, one of the main questions Foucault raises in his article is the question; ‘is [a text] not what an author has written?’ This question is answered in combination with Barthes, in that academics ‘are criticizing not so much the common sense notion that individual authors write the texts, but the kinds of mystical associations which cluster around them in capitalist societies.’ (Moran) In other words, academics are not oblivious to the fact that a text has to be written by a writer, that it has to be produced, but that for critics and academics the meaning of a text should not be tried to found within the figure of the author or that this author has any power or authority over the text after its creation and publication.

At the same time that the author was killed off by academics and theorists, however, a new type of authorship started to take shape outside of this world of academia. While the author was slowly killed in academia he started to attain a more divine and immortal status in mass culture. Around the same time that the first steps towards the removal of the author from his texts started to take shape in the academic environments of the 18th and 19th century, the author was also starting to become more and more of a public figure and celebrity, something that is perhaps best illustrated by Oscar Wilde’s rise to stardom and celebrity through both the publication and popular critique of his work as well as through the public’s obsession with the intrigue, scandal and drama surrounding his personal live.

The author’s image and celebrity became increasingly more important with the arrival of modernism and mass culture and the arrival of the bestseller author. Bestselling authors would become celebrity authors, not only praised for their individual achievements in literature but also through the public’s intrigue into their personal lives and would become more and more of a public figure. Indeed many of these popular authors, like Gertrude Stein, would become concerned with their newly achieved celebrity status and the loss of private life. Their private lives started to become just as important as the ideas they tried to bring across in their texts. This focus on the private life of the author in modernism reached its peak within contemporary capitalist society and has created a large rift between the approaches of academics and cultural critics in their approach towards authorship. The former killing, the later idolizing.

This duality of authorship has had quite some consequences on the author producing the texts. What Jameson has called the ‘commodification of culture’ has not only caused the work produced by the author to be transformed into reproducible commodities owned by large corporation out of the control of the author, these corporations have also turned the author himself into a commodity. Indeed Moran argues that ‘the author becomes gradually less in control not only of her work but also of her image and how it circulates, at the same time as the machinery of celebrity asserts what literary critics call ‘the intentional fallacy’’ It is this commodification of the author, in combination with the celebrity status that is linked with it, that has caused the large rift between perspectives of authorship in academia and the mass culture industries yet both approaches seem to have removed the author from his texts in their own unique way.

This duality of authorship has also caused for speculation of identity and the role of the author by authors themselves. In this essay I will focus on just one such author who has speculated extensively on this duality of authorship and who has, in his own texts, not only written on this but has also further complicated the role of the author, in relation to his texts and his art, but has also appeared to come up with a way of overcoming the division between the two forms and on the role of the author after his death.

The first means at Auster’s disposal for exploring and complicating the separation of author and text is by saturating his fictional work with biographical facts. Auster appears to have a knack for interweaving personal biographical details throughout his fictional work. However, unlike with an author like Bret Eaton Ellis whose private life has been extensively published in glossy gossip magazines and whose personal biographical facts are easily spotted in his semi-autobiographical semi-fictitious novel Lunar Park, Auster’s personal life has remained relatively private. This means that any biographical references to the ‘real’ Paul Auster are often not explicitly mentioned or expressed but are subverted within the text. The personal and biographical details incorporated with his texts only become apparent when read against the light of his non-fictional text the Invention of Solitude in which he explores his reasons for writing and sheds some light on his past.
Auster, however, does not stop with just combining autobiographical details in his fictional work. Auster also has a tendency to incorporate himself into the text. In his The New York Trilogy Auster has written himself into the text as a secondary character, a cameo appearance if you will, by referring to a character in the story with his own proper name.

Rather than just complicating this separation of author from text Auster appears to also come up with a solution, a defibrillator for the dead author if you will. In The New York Trilogy all three protagonists of the three different sub-texts, City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room are all, in their own ways both author and detective and it is this combination of author and detective that is part of the solution Auster presents us with. John Zilcosky argues that the protagonists in The New York Trilogy are what he calls ‘author-detectives’;

‘Auster’s detectives are dependent, often desperately so, on their criminals. Each reads carefully his criminal’s books and notebooks; Quinn, the hero of volume one, even turns his criminal’s daily walks into a text: he traces the paths of his criminal’s journeys onto a piece of paper and reads them as letters in the alphabet.’(196)

There are however some difficulties in their desires to know the subjects of their investigations. In Ghosts, the second text of the novel, the protagonist, a private eye by the name of Blue, is hired by a rather mysterious man called white to shadow another man, an author, called Black. Blue accepts the job and moves into an apartment looking out at Black’s austere apartment. Like the author of a text, the detective in Ghosts is fully aware of his actions and keeps a notebook to record his observations;

“his method is to stick to outward facts, describing events as though each word tallied exactly with the thing described, and to question the matter no further. Words are transparent for him, great windows that stand between him and the world, and until now they have never impeded his view, have never seemed to be there. […] he tries to fashion a coherent whole, discarding the slack and embellishing the gist. In every report he has written so far, action holds forth interpretation. […], no stab at trying to guess what the subject might be thinking. The report confines itself to known and verifiable facts” (148)

The protagonists believe in the objectivity of words to describe actions and his desire to stay on the surface of things is a trait he highly values into himself. A statement mirrored in the first text of the novel City of Glass; “We will set down things seen as seen, things heard as heard, so that our book may be an accurate record, free from any sort of fabrication. And all who read this book or hear it may do so with full confidence, because it contains nothing but the truth.’” (6)

However, where Zilcosky argues for a reading of the protagonist as an author-detective I would change these two roles into that of the academic-critic. The text is centered on the issue of knowing the other and in a desire to find meaning in the actions of this person, in making public the private. I would argue that all three separate texts are linked by their allegorizing of the changing perspectives on authorship and the relationship between author and text.

Foucault argues in “What is an Author?” that the act of writing ‘was also the eluding of death; one spoke, telling stories into the early morning, in order to forestall death, to postpone the day of reckoning that would silence the narrator. […] narrative is an effort, renewed each night, to keep death outside the circle of life.’ Foucault continues by arguing that ‘our culture has metamorphosed this idea of narrative, or writing, as something designed to ward of death’. This idea of warding off death by the act of narrating or writing is mirrored in Quinn, the protagonists of City of Glass, who fears the end of the notebook as it would, through his complete dependence on the act of writing for a sustaining of life would entail the death of him. This is then a clear reference to Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author”.

This increasing dependence by Quinn on the act of writing is so complete at the end of the text that he is completely subsumed into the act of writing Quinn has become the metaphysical author. He completely interwoven with the creative act of writing. And, mirroring Barthes, Quinn ultimately has an ‘antithetical reaction to the “end” of the red notebook: he equates it with the end of his life.’(Zilcosky) In other words; the completion of the narrative or the end of the act of writing results in the death of the author.

Auster, however, does not stop there. All three of his texts can be read as allegories on different aspects of authorship and offer a different perspective on the contemporary position of the author in relation to his text. In all three protagonists we also find the contemporary mass culture based capitalist critics approach to authorship and the complete focus of the critic on the personal life of the author in the hopes of discovering meaning in their private actions. In this the role dual role of author-detective and author criminal that John Zilcosky argues for in his article. In this reading the act of writing and the job of the detective are similar in their exploration of the other. I would however argue that the author-detective is in fact the critic-detective.

As mentioned above, today’s mass culture has the tendency to ‘attempt to authenticate its image of the author’, a complete mass (capitalist) cultural construction, ‘by a fascination with the ‘private’ self’ in a sense, in contemporary criticism ‘the audience’s relation with the star is a compulsive search for the ‘real’ – an attempt to distinguish between the ‘authentic ‘and the ‘superficial’ […] People use celebrity as a way of speculating about the nature of the individual in contemporary society [trying to] make sense of the experience of being a person in a particular kind of social production’(Moran)

This contemporary tendency and obsession with the private and personal life of the author is another theme explored in Auster’s The New York Trilogy. In all three sub-texts the three protagonists are not only authors producing texts, in the shape of penning down their observations in their omnipresent notebooks, but also literary critics. The characters in the novel that the protagonists are following and observing are all authors as well. These three authors, Stillman in City of Glass, Black in Ghosts and Fenshaw in The Locked Room are however what can be labeled as ‘proper’ authors in the sense that they are professional published authors.

In The New York Trilogy Auster uses the character of the author and his observer to comment on contemporary society’s tendency for and obsession with the personal and private life of the author rather than on his work and society’s tendency try and find meaning outside of the text through the actions and biographical details of the text’s originator. Indeed Quinn, the protagonist in City of Glass, seems to parody this contemporary obsession with the author’s private life by transforming Stillman’s daily walks into text and trying to discover meaning in them;

‘Quinn then copied out the letters in order: OWEROFBAB. After fiddling with them for a quarter of an hour, switching them around, pulling them apart, rearranging the sequence, he returned to the original order and wrote them out in the following manner: OWER OF BAB. The solution seemed so grotesque that his nerve almost failed him.’

Indeed Quinn, mirroring the contemporary tendency to speculate on observed detail, adds to his observation to find meaning to it;

‘making all due allowances for the fact that he had missed the first four days and that Stillman had not yet finished, the answer seemed inescapable: THE TOWER OF BABEL.’

This idea of trying to discover meaning in the actions of an author is mirrored by Blue, the protagonist in the trilogy’s second text Ghosts in which he claims that;

“his method is to stick to outward facts, describing events as though each word tallied exactly with the thing described, and to question the matter no further. Words are transparent for him, great windows that stand between him and the world, and until now they have never impeded his view, have never seemed to be there. […] he tries to fashion a coherent whole, discarding the slack and embellishing the gist. In every report he has written so far, action holds forth interpretation. […], no stab at trying to guess what the subject might be thinking. The report confines itself to known and verifiable facts” (148)

This all highly reminiscent of the way that contemporary mass culture, as well as traditional pre-Barthesian critics, have tried to find meaning outside of the text and trying to find the author’s intention by looking at the personal life or, in other words, Elliot’s “Intentional Fallacy”. Indeed “He […] disbelieved the arbitrariness of Stillman’s actions. He wanted there to be a sense to them” (109). Halfway through City of Glass however the object of his obsession, the author Stillman, is killed off, mirroring Roland Barthes’ killing off of the author.

The death of the author is thus taken literally, and the critic is left with nothing but the text left by the author and the observations made of his life. It is at this moment that Auster brings forth his solution to the death of the author and the problem of authority. The disappearance or death of Stillman, and thus the author, has paralyzed Quinn. Quinn had been obsessed with trying to discover the ‘intent of the author’ but the death of Stillman has given rise ‘to chance, a nightmare of numbers and probabilities. There were no more clues, no leads, no moves to be made’ (141)

This statement by the narrator mirror’s Foucault’s remarks on the death of the author in ‘What is an Author’; ‘I seem to call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author […] a culture in which the fictive would operate in an absolutely free state, in which fiction would be put at the disposal of everyone and would develop without passing through something like a necessary or constraining figure.’(119)

For Quinn then, the author still functioned as a constraining entity. Stillman restricted the interpretative possibilities for Quinn. The sudden death of the author has left Quinn in a state of paralysis from which he does not appear to be able to escape. At the end of City of Glass, however, Quinn appears to return to his former self and moves away from the role of traditional academic/ contemporary critic back to being an author and becomes, as mentioned above, absorbed in his own writing, becoming himself the author who is completely dependent on his act of writing to stay alive until he eventually, at the end of City of Glass, disappears completely and is replaced by two other authors; the character author “Paul Auster” who he visited earlier and an unnamed first person narrator who claims to be the editor of Quinn’s red note book. This narrator continuously denies authorship of City of Glass, claiming instead that he is only the editor of the previous mentioned notebook. This however is quickly seen as a lie as the notebook does not appear in Quinn’s possession until halfway through the story, indeed as the narrator himself claims; “The red notebook, of course, is only half the story, as any sensitive reader will understand.”

Picking up on this comment we can then assume that Auster’s unnamed narrator is responsible for most, if not for all, of the story. It would appear that it has been the narrator who has created the story, the characters, setting and the plot which finally led to Quinn’s madness, solitude and disappearance. The Narrator, however, refuses to take responsibility for his behavior and instead lays the blame on the character Auster instead. By again interweaving himself, through the use of his proper name, into the story Auster appears to be able to free up the narrator of the story of any connection to the man whose name is written in bold on the cover. By using his proper name Auster is able to free the narrator from any constraints that are interwoven with the concept of authority and authorship, opening up the written narrative and the identity of narration to free speculation by academics and critics, removing, in a sense, the possibility for Elliot’s “Intentional fallacy”.

By both interweaving autobiographical details and his own name as a character within the text Auster appears to distance himself from the actual narration of the story. In this way Auster appears to argue for the autonomy of the text and the separation of author from text. By doing this Auster transfers any authority he might have as the name on the cover from himself to the narrator. By “killing” himself in the text he frees himself from the constraints of authorship. With City of Glass Auster both kills himself as the authority by giving him life within the text. By doing this Auster appears to overcome the dualities of contemporary authorship. One) Auster, like Barthes and Foucault, argues against trying to find any meaning within the private or public sphere of the author and celebrity figure. Two) Argues against the possibility of complete removal of the author and authorial voice of the author by saturating the text with autobiographical elements, making it nearly impossible to distinguish reality from fiction. And three) resolves the issues raised above by his very imbuing of the authorial self into the story, killing himself as the author and freeing up the narrator to live beyond the text as an entity free of any authorial constraints and freeing up the text for limitless interpretation.

Bibliography:

Auster, Paul (1988) The Invention of Solitude. New York: Penguin Books
Auster, Paul (1988) The New York Trilogy. New York: Faber & Faber
Auster, Paul (2005) The Red Notebook. New York: Faber & Faber
Barone, Dennis (1995) Beyond the Red Notebook. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
Barthes, Roland Death of the Author in Prison in Leitch, V.B et al (2010) The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism. 2nd ed. W. W. Norton & Company: New York
Foucault, Michell (1977) What is an Author? in Leitch, V.B et al (2010) The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism. 2nd ed. W. W. Norton & Company: New York
Moran, Joe (2000) Star Authors; Literary Celebrity in America. Pluto Press: London
Zilcosky, John (2010) The Revenge of the Author; Paul Auster’s Challenge to Theory. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 39:3, 195-206